让胸部X光诊断模型对不同人群更公平,同时不牺牲准确率。
Stride-Net: Fairness-Aware Disentangled Representation Learning for Chest X-Ray Diagnosis
- 通过可学习的掩码选择与标签匹配的图像区域,抑制敏感属性信息。
- 在多个数据集上提升公平性指标,且准确率不下降或更高。
- 适合关注医疗AI公平性的研究者和临床部署团队。
用于胸部X光分类的深度神经网络虽平均表现强劲,但常在特定人口群体中表现不佳,引发临床安全与公平性担忧。现有去偏方法往往在不同数据集上效果不一,或以降低整体诊断效能为代价实现公平性,将公平性视为事后约束而非表征属性。本文提出Stride-Net(基于解耦与可学习掩码的敏感属性鲁棒学习,结合嵌入对齐),一种面向公平性的框架,旨在学习疾病判别性强且不受人口属性影响的胸部X光表征。Stride-Net 在图像块级别运作,使用可学习的步长掩码选择与标签一致的图像区域,同时通过对抗混淆损失抑制敏感属性信息。为进一步锚定表征于临床语义、防止捷径学习,我们引入组最优传输,强制图像特征与BioBERT生成的疾病标签嵌入对齐。在MIMIC-CXR和CheXpert基准上,针对种族及交叉种族-性别子群体进行评估,无论采用ResNet还是视觉变压器架构,Stride-Net均持续提升公平性指标,同时保持或超越基线准确率,实现优于先前去偏方法的准确率-公平性权衡。代码已公开于https://github.com/Daraksh/Fairness_StrideNet。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep neural networks for chest X-ray classification achieve strong average performance, yet often underperform for specific demographic subgroups, raising critical concerns about clinical safety and equity. Existing debiasing methods frequently yield inconsistent improvements across datasets or attain fairness by degrading overall diagnostic utility, treating fairness as a post hoc constraint rather than a property of the learned representation. In this work, we propose Stride-Net (Sensitive Attribute Resilient Learning via Disentanglement and Learnable Masking with Embedding Alignment), a fairness-aware framework that learns disease-discriminative yet demographically invariant representations for chest X-ray analysis. Stride-Net operates at the patch level, using a learnable stride-based mask to select label-aligned image regions while suppressing sensitive attribute information through adversarial confusion loss. To anchor representations in clinical semantics and discourage shortcut learning, we further enforce semantic alignment between image features and BioBERT-based disease label embeddings via Group Optimal Transport. We evaluate Stride-Net on the MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert benchmarks across race and intersectional race-gender subgroups. Across architectures including ResNet and Vision Transformers, Stride-Net consistently improves fairness metrics while matching or exceeding baseline accuracy, achieving a more favorable accuracy-fairness trade-off than prior debiasing approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/Daraksh/Fairness_StrideNet.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。